


JayTimBINGO2019: Soulmate Week

by meaninglessblah



Series: JayTimBINGO2019 [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Monochromatic, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Ficlet Collection, Gen, JayTimBINGO2019, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-08-20 16:00:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20230528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meaninglessblah/pseuds/meaninglessblah
Summary: A collection of drabbles and short stories for the JayTim Bingo Challenge 2019. Entries for Soulmate Week enclosed!1. "Passenger Seat" - Hijacked a car with someone sleeping in the back AU2. "Bright Vivid Colours" - Monochromatic AU where you see in black and white until you meet your soulmate3. "Danger" - Pacific Rim AU4. "???" - ???5. "???" - ???





	1. Passenger Seat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A collection of drabbles and short stories for the [JayTimWeek](https://jaytimweek.tumblr.com) Bingo Challenge 2019.  
Prompt: "Passenger Seat" - Hijacked a car with someone sleeping in the back AU

It’s amazing what you can bribe a university student into minding with the wave of a crisp fifty dollar note. Jason had slammed his red helmet down onto the half-catatonic student’s anatomy textbook, startling them into as near to full alertness as one could get with intense caffeine withdrawal in their system. 

“Fifty to watch the helmet,” he offers in a sharp, hurried bark, holding their frown through the white-out lenses of his domino. When they open their mouth to protest, he sweetens the deal with, “I’ll buy you two textbooks of your choice as well, just name them.” 

A slow blink that seems to take eons when measured against the risen hairs on Jason’s neck and the impatient thrum of his pulse in his ears. “_Introduction to Molecular Cell Biology_ and _Neuroanatomy in Clinical Context_,” they rattle off, and Jason slaps the dollar bill onto the table as he vaults it, sprinting through the library. 

When he crosses into the actual gallery of the library, he slows to a casual walk and shucks his domino between two empty aisles, yanking up the hood of his sweatshirt. He counts his breaths in time with his carefully measured steps, until his lungs have settled and the flush of exertion has drained from his face. Then he adjusts his leather jacket, tugs the hood down a little further to cover his face, and slides a beaten copy of Foucault's _The Order of Things _under his arm as he emerges into the main thoroughfare of Gotham U’s campus library. 

He folds himself into a pocket between two chattering groups of students who look about his age. Lets his bootsteps match their pace as he casts a surreptitious gaze around for his pursuers. Jason had managed to lose them between the coffee shop and the quad, shimmying into the library bathrooms through an open window to a lot less surprise than he’d expected. The only other person present when he’d hit the tiles had taken a sweeping glance and grunted a salutation, turning back to brushing their teeth in the pockmarked mirror. 

Jason didn’t really have time to spare for questioning why someone was beginning their morning routine at 1pm on a Thursday, but he’d seen weirder. He hadn’t even really intended on ending up on campus; Gotham University happened to be a neat stepping stone between the two parks Jason had been sprinting through, trying to outrun a pack of mobsters who had crashed his safehouse. 

He was rarely this disorganised. But he’d been pulling double shifts ever since an up-and-coming mob family had decided that dealing to students in daylight hours was an acceptable alternative to braving the Bats at night. Honestly, if anything, this was Bruce’s fault, for not shutting down their operation sooner. But apparently the Bat had bigger fish to fry, so once again Jason was left to pick up the threads of societal decency. 

Jason shoulders through the library doors, peeling away from the mass of students headed for the cafeteria once he’s certain he’s shaken his tail. He makes a beeline for the nearest campus carpark, jamming his hands into the pocket of his hoodie. 

He keeps his head down, stealing clandestine glances into the dashes of the cars he passes, in the guise of looking for his own. When he spots two leather-jacket-clad grunts surveying the rows of cars from the front of a nearby building, Jason turns down the nearest aisle and assesses his choices. There’s a small red hatchback that looks pre-2001 on his right, or a silver sedan with some over-expensive rims that Jason would have jacked in a heartbeat twelve years ago. 

He picks the hatchback, mostly because its sun-spotted roof looks less conspicuous, and Jason doesn’t really want to battle the sedan’s obnoxious alarm system while ducking the gazes of two mafia grunts. 

So Jason angles his hips back against the driver’s side door, jeans snagging on the lip of the window as he pulls his cell out and pretends to scroll through his texts. When the grunts descend from their vantage point into the sea of cars, Jason wrenches his elbow back and shatters the window. 

No alarm, he notes as he slides a hand in and fumbles for the door latch. Must be some faulty electrical wiring. He makes a mental reminder to take a look under the hood when he finishes burglarizing this poor student’s ride. Maybe he can return it with some slight improvements to make up for the B&E. Then he shrugs into the seat and flicks the book onto the passenger seat. 

The car is objectively _filthy, _empty coffee cups and crumpled chip packets strewn through the interior. Jason pauses to sweep a hand across the old seat cover, pushing an armful of candy wrappers and crumbs into the passenger seat footwell. Then he leans down to yank the flimsy plastic cover off the steering column, fingers finding the wires by rote. 

All it takes is a quick glide of his blade over the copper and rubber casing, and then Jason can twist and scrape the wires together. The car purrs to life beneath him, juddering as he slides his seatbelt on and yanks the gearshift into drive. 

He peels out of the lot at a respectable twenty miles per hour, holding his breath as he rolls past the searching grunts and onto the main road. It’s not until Gotham U has faded in his rearview mirror that Jason exhales a shuddering breath. 

He’s internally debating whether he needs to disinfect the car for fingerprints (he’s wearing gloves, but getting complacent about stray skin and hair follicles leads to the GCPD snooping around in cold cases) when some asshole cuts him off, and Jason wrenches the steering wheel aside to avoid a collision. The hatchback’s wheels screech, and he would have slammed a shoulder into the window with the force of it, if the glass had been intact. Jason swears and lays on the horn, because _not _exhibiting road rage in Gotham is more of a tell than drawing the attention in the first place. Jason doesn’t think there’s any mafioso tailing him still, but he won’t feel safe until he’s kicking back a beer on his couch in the Bowery. 

Something groans groggily from the backseat, and Jason stiffens, gaze flickering to the rearview mirror. 

The bundle of quilts on the back seat shifts and reconstitutes itself into a humanoid form, and Jason stares and grips the steering wheel, foot inching for the accelerator. 

“Hey, dude, what the hell?” the sleep-strained voice filters through from his unintended passenger and probable hijacking victim. 

Then the blankets shift to reveal pitch-black hair, mussed and cowlicked, but nonetheless reaching down to the teen’s shoulders. His Gotham U sweatshirt hangs off one narrow shoulder, several sizes too big, but even in the broken midday light, Jason can make out the faint white of scar tissue on his exposed skin. 

A palm lifts to burrow into an eye socket, pinched beneath a frowning brow, and then those blue eyes blink blearily out at him, widening. 

“_Jason?!_” Tim bleats, and then focuses on something just past the windscreen. “Fuck! Truck!” 

Jason spins back around fast enough to discern the rapidly looming tailgate of a stationary moving van, and he jams both boots on the brake, skidding them to a sharp halt with a foot to spare. It’s nearly a full minute before Jason’s heart calms enough that he can look into the rearview mirror again. 

Tim looks pale, meeting Jason’s gaze as he shucks the blankets and shimmies through the divide into the passenger seat. Jason stares as he manoeuvres around the trash, inspecting the book Jason had stolen. “Some light reading?” he asks with an arched brow. 

Jason snatches it from him and tosses it onto the back seats, then he doubles down with his glower. “What the hell are you doing here, replacement?” 

Tim looks coolly unimpressed. “_I_ study h- Where are we?” 

“Not Gotham U,” Jason supplies. “What are you doing sleeping in the back of some trashed out hatchback? I thought you owned a Ferrari, rich boy.” 

“I do own a Ferrari,” Tim replies blandly, and watches as Jason creeps forward to follow the truck’s progress, locked in Gotham’s downtown traffic. “Hatchback is less conspicuous for a postgrad.” 

“Wait, you’re _genuinely _studying? Since when?” 

Tim shrugs. “A lot of investors like to see a Wayne Enterprises CEO with an MBA. Wanted to make sure I at least humoured them before laughing them out the door.” 

Jason barks a laugh that’s a tad too high-pitched to be genuine. His pulse still feels too frantic in his veins. “So you’re slumming it with the regular folk. Still doesn’t explain why you’re camping out in this shitbox.” 

“I sleep wherever and whenever I can squeeze it in,” Tim answers, eyeing him suspiciously. Jason’s hands tighten on the wheel. “Better question: why are you hijacking a broke student’s car?” 

“You’re hardly broke,” Jason retorts, sidestepping that question. 

Tim follows. “I work hard to maintain my broke-bespoke lifestyle. I thought you were past jacking cars.” 

Jason shoots him a glare, which Tim blinks owlishly at and doesn’t back down from. Finally, Jason looks away. “I had some mafioso on my ass. For the record, it was a coincidence, jacking your car.” 

Tim looks vaguely horrified. “You were going to jack a broke student’s wheels?” 

Jason glares at the windshield. “I was planning on returning it. You need to fix your alarm, by the way,” he adds on second thought. 

“There isn’t an alarm.” 

“I know,” Jason replies, and gestures vaguely to the shattered window. “Noticed that pretty early on. Why doesn’t your car have a working alarm?” 

Tim shrugs. “I disabled it.” 

Exasperation laces through Jason. “_Why?_” 

He’s offered an incredulous look from the passenger seat. “Because I’m a vigilante. I figured I’d be able to handle anyone who tried to steal my shitty car. And if they managed to steal it without me noticing, they probably need it more than I do anyway. Besides, I kept setting the damn alarm off at godawful hours of the morning when I forgot my keys. Campus security threatened to have me escorted off the premises. So I shut it off.” 

“That’s the dumbest logic I’ve ever heard. And you didn’t even wake up until I nearly smeared us across the road. At which point was I supposed to fight you for ownership of this shitty red hatchback?” 

“I could go a few rounds now,” Tim mutters darkly, right as a spray of bullets opens up the back windscreen. 

Jason moves instinctively, throwing out a hand to wrap around Tim’s neck and shove him down. Tim squirms out of his grip as Jason throws the car into reverse and jams his foot down on the gas. The car flies backwards, slamming into a nondescript tan-brown sedan with two infuriated grunts inside. 

“Fuck,” Jason spits, shifting the gears and peeling up onto the (thankfully) empty sidewalk. Tim’s hands leap to the door handle and the dash respectively, bracing as the car bucks against the gutter. 

“Do these guys know you’re-?” 

“Can we please ask the questions later?” Jason growls, manoeuvring around a fire hydrant as he cuts back onto an emptier lane. The tan sedan rears up in the mirror a second later, and Jason can physically feel how tight the muscles in his shoulders are wound. 

Tim glances into the side mirror, blanching at the rate at which the grunts are closing the distance. Then his hand shoots out, fumbling for the stereo’s volume knob. Jason spares the barest half-second to glance down at him incredulously. 

“Replacement, what the _fuck _are you doing?” 

“Thought it might lighten the mood,” he grunts between gritted teeth, and flicks to a classic rock station. The wavering notes of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ grind through the speakers, filling the small space with an unrepentant drum synth. Tim pauses for a beat, and then spins the dial to near-full volume. 

Jason laughs shrilly, cutting through a stop sign in a streak of red and praying they don’t end up smears on the pavement. The thought of them flying through the bloody, shattering windshield has Jason’s arm snapping out to tug Tim’s seatbelt across his waist. Tim gets the message, fumbling to secure his belt, unwilling to compromise on his stiff brace against the dashboard. 

“Two hundred degrees!” Tim bellows without warning, startling Jason, “That’s why they call me-” 

“Mister Fahrenheit!” Jason replies after a split, stunned second. He drills them around a corner, rubber burning as he jams the pedal to the floor and shifts gears. “I’m travelling at the-” 

“Speed of light!” Tim shrieks, wincing as they mount the curb briefly. 

“I wanna make a super-” 

“-sonic man-” 

“-outta you!” 

A sign offering twenty-four hour parking for the low, low price of thirty-five dollars a day rears up on Jason’s left, and he squeals past a cruising SUV to cut into the parking garage at full speed. Tim screams freely as they cascade down the ramp, and his hand flashes out to snap the headlights’ stalk on in time for Jason to dodge a pedestrian. 

“_On a collision course,_” Freddie croons through the speakers as Jason flings them into another storey, “_I am a satellite. I’m outta control-_” 

“Park!” Tim yelps, thrusting an outstretched finger towards a neat spot nestled between two obnoxiously large SUVs. Jason yanks the steering wheel aside to pull them in, brakes squealing, and stalls the ignition. 

The headlights blink out, the upbeat pulse of music snapping off to leave them in cloying silence. They both duck down in their seats, hearts thrumming a frantic bruise as the purr of an engine rolls towards them, waxing and then waning as it crawls past. 

In the quiet that follows, Jason can feel the laboured rise and fall of his own chest, hear the unsteady ricochet of Tim’s own breathing next to his. Jason’s not sure how long they crouch in the footwells, staring wide-eyed across the short distance at each other, but Jason has a front row seat when Tim’s features pinch, laughter bubbling up through his lips. 

He claps a hand over his mouth almost immediately, tears springing to his eyes as he laughs silently, shoulders jerking. Jason’s not sure why, but the mirth breaches up through him too, and then he’s guffawing alongside the teenager, clutching his ribs. 

“Did- did we just have a high speed chase to Freddie freakin’ Mercury?” Tim bleats once he’s got himself marginally more under control. 

“That’s some quality bonding right there, replacement,” Jason chortles in response, blinking up through bleary eyes. He can feel the grin that splits his features, threatening to tear his lips with its brightness. “Bruce would be _proud_.” 

“Soulmate-level shit,” Tim concurs. “Dick will be jealous.” 

“Over what? The high speed chase, the Queen duet, or the fact that we’re obviously destined soulmates?” 

Tim snorts. “Take your pick.” 

Jason sighs, letting the pressure ease off his ribs as he exhales the last of his gripping mirth. “Sorry for kidnapping you, Timbers.” 

“Sorry for only being able to offer you a shit ride.” 

“Next time we go for the Ducati, alright?” 

“Absolutely. Matte red?” 

Jason rolls his head until he can meet Tim’s grin with one of his own. “As if there’s a better colour. Would you have it any other way, soulmate?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soulmate AUs aren't really my forte. So this one's a cheat. They're more circumstantial soulmates. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ 
> 
> The next few fics will be actual Soulmate AUs, I promise. Bear with me!


	2. Bright Vivid Colours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A collection of drabbles and short stories for the [JayTimWeek](https://jaytimweek.tumblr.com) Bingo Challenge 2019.  
Prompt: "Bright Vivid Colours" - Monochromatic AU where you see in black and white until you meet your soulmate, and once they die, you go back to seeing in black and white

Red is Tim's favourite colour. It was the very first colour he ever saw, peering down the lens of the camera he'd gotten for his eleventh birthday at the figure flipping across the warehouse floor below. He'd been crouched on one of the abandoned catwalks, camera heavy in his grip as he'd tracked the black-clad bat and his suddenly jewel-toned ward on their rampage through a row of mobsters. 

He'd known immediately that it wasn't Dick Grayson. Not because this Robin was just the barest inch too short, or because his hair was just slightly too long to be the original Robin's wavy locks. Tim knew this was a new Robin because the instant he laid eyes on his soulmate, his world burst into bright, vivid _ colour_. 

Tim cocks a hip against the bathroom counter, gaze tracing the array of 6x4s and polaroids littering the surface of the pockmarked mirror as he scrubs his brush across his teeth. The collage is one of the few personal touches Tim has made to Jason's - _ their _ \- safehouse since he half-moved in. Whenever he's not at the penthouse or Wayne Tower, he's curled up with his laptop on the sofa in the next room, waiting for Jason to finish his night shift or digging through the freezer for leftovers of Jason’s coveted chili con carne. 

There's a lot of photos plastered to the mirror, some recent and a lot older. And the consistent, recurring detail, is that vibrant, vivid red. It's splashed across every single one of them, from Jason's crimson hood, to Tim's burgundy sweatshirt, to the cherry of his Ducati, to the scarlet of Robin's suit. A different shade every time, but _ their _ colour, definitely. 

Tim's awfully possessive of that red. He's not overly protective of most things he has; growing up with a chequebook in your back pocket and the tendency to churn through batarangs like paper has instilled in him a certain selfish sense of impermeability. But Tim loves their red, has loved it since he first set eyes on Jason Todd, Boy Wonder, from up on a dingy catwalk. 

Tim rakes his eyes over the mirror's mosaic, drinking in the positioning, the framing, the contrasts. There's a lot of galleries who pay handsomely for artists’ mid-monochrome work. Tim can sort of see the appeal; seeing things in shades lends itself to valuing different attributes. He can tell which of his snapshots are from his mid-monochrome and post-monochrome phases, just based on the shift in contrast. When everything comes out in washes of grey, you start looking for different ways to frame the brutality of Batman's punches and the arch of Dick Grayson's tumbles through the air. 

It had never been that way with Jason, because from the moment Tim had laid eyes on him, he’d been drinking in his colours. The rosy flush of his cheeks in the morning light, the bloodshot stain in his eyes after a long night’s patrol, the pink of his tongue where it peeks between his lips when his hands grip a wrench with surety and purpose. 

There’s other colours too. His eyes, for one; Tim’s never gotten enough of those blues. So many hues layered one over another, like a spinning wheel of turquoise. There’s a new tint every time Tim looks into them, a new ocean or sky to look at. His hair too; the turmoil of black and ebony, and that sharp streak of white that Tim threads his fingers through whenever Jason’s sprawled over his lap on the sofa, groaning about Damian’s latest adoptee or Dick’s newest pop obsession. His freckles are one of Tim’s favourites; little kisses of colour inked into his cheekbones and his shoulders and all down his chest, that Tim likes to chase with teeth and tongue whenever he’s got Jason pressed back against the bedsheets, marking every last one as he descends. 

Tim scrubs at his back molar, ducking around the doorframe into their bedroom to snag one of Jason’s discarded hoodies. Autumn’s setting in, staining the leaves ochre in the dawn light, and it’s Tim’s favourite time of year. There’s a chill settling over Gotham, warning of crisp afternoons with his legs tangled between Jason’s, and coffee mugs balanced between their knees in front of the television. 

He shrugs into the sweatshirt, yanking it back up over his shoulder when it slips down, and folding the sleeves back over his long fingers. Tim pauses to inhale Jason’s smell, smiling softly to himself in the light that spills from the empty bathroom. Then he turns back for the sink to rinse and spit. 

Tim’s leaned over the vanity, palms wrapped around the porcelain and toothbrush jammed under the faucet, when everything flickers grey. 

He stills, blinking to clear his vision, and frowns up at his reflection, gaze tracking over the collage of them. The crimson of Jason’s sweatshirt leeches to an ashen pale, the chromes of red waning to stark silvers as Tim’s heart sinks into the pit of him. 

Tim’s scrambling for the bedside table before he can think, colours bursting and subsiding in his view as he upturns books in search of the tiny thumbnail-sized earpiece. He finds it tucked behind Jason’s clothbound copy of Jane Austen’s _ Emma_, and watches the red buckram stain to soot before snapping back to harsh scarlet. 

Tim fumbles the comm into his ear and barks, “Oracle, where is he?” 

“Who?” comes the even, if distracted, reply. 

“Jay, where’s Jay?” Tim snaps, shoving open the window and sliding onto the fire escape. The cold hits him like a wall of ice, and Tim grips the banister with leeched white knuckles. 

“No names on the co-” 

“_Babs_,” Tim pleads, and something in his wretched tone must bypass Barbara’s strict adherence to protocol. 

“Narrows,” she asserts after a spare moment, and Tim’s already flinging himself off the fire escape, taking to the rooftops. He can hear the clack of her keyboard past his strangled breaths. “Alley behind the Cauldron. North of Saint Avenue. Do you need back up?” 

Tim just wheezes a choked sob and pushes himself to run _ faster_. He’s halfway between two apartment blocks when his vision greys out for a solid five seconds, and Tim screams wordlessly past the heart lodged in his throat, staggering off-balance as he touches down. 

“Okay, T,” Barbara’s voice presses down the line, tight and forcibly calm. “You’ve got to breathe. Your heart monitor is-” 

“I can’t _ see_,” Tim bleats, and can't get any more words out. He vaults a ventilation unit, uncaring as he shreds his palm open on the rivets. When he glances down at his injured hand, the blood flickers red and then leeches out again. “The colours, they’re… Babs, he’s- he’s-” 

“You’re nearly there,” Barbara asserts as Tim spies the newspaper-plastered billboard over Noonan’s Bar. “I’m routing a bus to your location. Just get him stable, Tim, he’ll be-” 

Tim hits the pavement in front of a pack of stunned loiterers leaned up on a boarded up storefront, staggering with the momentum as he zeroes in on the mouth of the alley. The figures bark in surprise as he sprints through them, skirting around the corner of an old brick house and freezing. 

Jason’s on the ground, facedown in a shallow pool of blood. It’s smeared on the collar of his brown leather jacket and the shoots of black hair that poke through his shattered helmet. Tim’s beside him in an instant, rolling Jason onto his side as his fingers drop instinctively to the underside of his armoured jaw, snagging on the catch mechanism. 

The helmet separates with a low hiss, and Tim flings it across the alley, hands flying to skitter across Jason’s face. His eyes are closed, a gash opening up one side of his forehead, and his eyebrows are laced with red blood. 

Tim nearly cries. Horror and joy lace up through his throat and choke him, because there’s blood but it’s _ red _ and that means Jason’s still alive, still fighting to stay with him, and Tim refuses to believe Jason would let him go without a fight. He cradles Jason in his lap and marks the minutes by the growing wail of sirens; watches the steady trail of crimson seep down his jaw until those ruby lights are splayed across the wall behind him. Tim drinks in every shade like it’s the last time he’ll ever see them, and clings to Jason until his knuckles turn grey. 

Red is Tim’s favourite colour. It was the very first colour he ever saw. He prays it won’t be the last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A domestic angst AU for y'all. Proper Soulmate stuff this time!  
It's shorter than the others, but hopefully the next few will make up for it.  
I've finally gotten through the busy season for my Viking re-enactment, which means I can officially actually start working on JayTimWeek. Woohoo!


	3. Danger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A collection of drabbles and short stories for the [JayTimWeek](https://jaytimweek.tumblr.com) Bingo Challenge 2019.  
Prompt: "Danger" - Pacific Rim AU

The drift is a tumultuous stream of light and sound for the first minute and a half. Jason tries not to fight it, focuses on staying loose and letting the current spin him where it wants to. Lets the neural waters wash over him, and shoves down the ever-present fear that today’s the day he’ll drown in here, held to the bottom of a filling sea by enough memories to fill two lifetimes, and never be able to break the surface for air. It fades the longer he’s down there, the colours and shapes forming themselves, coalescing into memories that are his and not his, and Jason’s never felt more connected to another person than he does right now. He feels like he’s phased through another’s essence, an intrusive shard lodged through the centre of Tim Drake’s consciousness, and he can’t pull free. Shouldn’t pull free, because that’s the point of the drift. Fusion, synthesis, establishing the bond. 

Establishing is a bad word for it. That’s too impersonal for how it feels to be thrust into another’s mind, to be shoved headfirst into the sea of their memories and held there as the air runs low and the oxygen loss swimming through his brain makes it _ feel _ like merging, truly. 

Clarity doesn’t snap so much as rip them into the neural handshake. 

Jason blinks, sees double. Sees the interior of the Jaeger’s helm shift and realign before him for a split second, before the drift sucks him back in. 

Jason is familiar with this part. He’s done this before, a hundred times with his red-haired copilot. It gets easier with repetition. The first time was - is - always the worst. 

This feels worse than then, though. This feels like trying to plug himself into a familiar outlet, and not fitting. This feels like Jason’s trying to squeeze himself through a different port, and expecting the old, safe warmth of his old copilot, his old friend. He’s not going to find it. 

In the back of his mind, Jason has the stark realisation that this is going to hurt. The initial neural handshake is always rough, is always rocky. Smashing together two consciousnesses, two minds, two persons’ worth of memories is always a struggle. And Jason’s not just bringing his memories into this drift; he’s carrying two lifetimes with him. There’s a ghost shrouded around his consciousness, the ache of an old friend, and Jason feels pity for his new copilot. 

Pity that Tim’s going to have to feel Roy’s presence in this drift, in this River Styx that ghosts never really die in. That he's going to yearn for a man he doesn’t know and won’t ever get to know, not really. That he’s going to be bombarded with not only Jason’s memories, but Roy’s too; the intimate pieces of Roy that Jason carries with him, too raw to stifle. Jason doesn’t want to stifle them. Doesn’t want to lose the memories when they’re all he has left. 

Jason wonders how many ghosts Tim carries into the drift with him. Wonders if he’ll be aching for a face he recognises but doesn’t know by the time they’re done. Wonders if there’s enough room in an infinite drift to hold Jason and Tim’s ghosts, and Jason clings tight to Roy’s memory, possessive. 

He’s wrenched into the first memory like he’s hitting the surface of an ocean. There’s discomfort and the initial sharp slap like hitting mental concrete, and then Jason’s floating in it, feeling it. 

He’s young. Young enough to know his own mother but not old enough to really know her yet. 

He’s jerked sideways, into another of his memories, and she’s here again, but older now. More lines on her face. The blue that stains her skin, pollutes her blood, has spread so much further than last time. A decade does that to a person. Jason watches her smile, and sing to him, and throw back the pills that don’t really seem to do anything. And he clenches his fists and watches a long-dead Kaiju gradually rip his mother apart from the inside out. He still filters his water now, even when he knows it’s clean. Knows that the Shatterdome isn’t Gotham and people actually care about who drinks the water here. 

Then Jason’s older by a few years, maybe nine or ten. Still too young to understand how fundraising galas are supposed to stop Kaijus, like wealth and prestige are comparable to the awe-inspiring might of a Jaeger. But old enough to know that every effort in the war is necessary. Every hard won inch brings them closer to the end of this convoluted race to extinction. Be it theirs or the beasts’. It’s just hard to reconcile the visceral stride of a battle-beaten Jaeger into the wash of the Atlantic Ocean with the facade of calm hundreds of diamond-studded millionaires pass back and forth like hors d’oeuvres at these events. 

Jason remembers the first time he saw a Jaeger on television. Remembers sitting with his face all but pressed against the screen, watching the hulking mecha climbing through the doors of the Shatterdome to meet the incoming Kaiju threat, invisible in the midday’s storm of a sea. Jason remembers watching that same Jaeger paraded down the streets of DC, its metal warped and mechanics exposed in places. Remembers that itching feeling in his palms, that need to climb inside it and see its nuclear heart, see its metal sinew and steel bones. To take it apart and understand it, and put it back together better and brighter than before. 

Then it’s his first day at the academy, thrice over. Every individual memory ringing with excitement and nerves and promise. Doused in the rosy tint of hope. He can feel the bruises of training, of sparring, of potential, lighting up his thighs and his ribs and his forearms. Can feel the firmness of Roy’s grip in his, feel the heat of his grin as he hauls Jason off the mats and slides back into an easy stance again, bo staff in hand. 

He’s looking up at Marshal Bruce Wayne, his grip firm around Jason’s handshake, and it’s at a gala but the mood is different. The atmosphere is tense. The Kaiju are a threat now, not just a promotional stunt to drag in funding. The funding that once went into seawalls and public shelters but is now dripping into private industry, is now flooding the manufacturing business with demands for reinforced personal shelters, demands for assurance that me and my family will be safer than those second-rate public deathtraps. And Marshall Wayne gives Jason a tight, knowing smile and congratulates him on his studies, and offers him a position at the academy, understudying a Jaeger pilot prodigy, one of the original generation. It’ll fast-track him to piloting, but Jason’s never been a stranger to bypassing his same-age peers. And Jason’s mother’s tone is biting when she gives her two cents, looking like a valkyrie in her handwoven satin and mink furs, her expression twisted into rage and offense and protection. And Jason hates how that tastes on the back of his tongue, how _ privilege _ and _ wealth _ are thrown around like that will fend off the apocalypse, like that’s a tool in war that he can actually wield. So Jason says yes, ignores the dejection in his parents’ expressions and the sad pride in Marshal Wayne’s. Tries not to question whether he was Wayne’s first or third or thirteenth choice, while images of the last touted prodigy being airlifted, bloody and mangled, from a Nova Scotian beach paint the backs of his eyelids. 

Jason sees his first proper Jaeger. Cranes his head so far back he worries it will fall off, it’s so high. He’s got a few more years as a cadet before he’ll see the inside of a helm, but that’s nothing compared to the majesty of seeing the real thing for the first time. He spends his breaks with his legs hitched over the edge of a catwalk - too high up for the fall to be anything but fatal - with his arms crossed over the chill of a yellow banister and his vision filled with the sheen of the Jaeger’s red mask. Wonders whether the simulations compare to actually being inside a Jaeger. Wonders whether his first mission will be a success. Wonders how he’ll feel once he can actually say he’s set foot inside a Jaeger, and Jason doesn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now. 

Then Jason’s parents are nothing more than a statistic in a news headline; a cruise ship decimated off the Carribean coastline, a tragic casualty in yet another Breach incident. He can’t mourn them, not properly, when there’s only empty coffins to cry over and more people who need salvation. So Jason picks himself up, holds together the seam ripping wide through the core of him, and gets back into a Jaeger. 

He’s good, he’s fucking _ good _ at this, because he can't be anything less. And Jason watches copilots slide through his memory like someone spinning a rolodex. The parts of faces and features that he can remember flitting past faster than he can grasp them. The fortitude of Conner’s arm on his shoulders, the cacophony of Bart’s laugh, more faces, more hands, more empty suits and emptier beds where friends used to be. And Jason doesn’t recognise any of them, but he knows them in the aching breach inside him, spitting forth another beast of loss everytime he has to climb into a new Jaeger and see a new face, an old face, and then a new face, again. Irreplaceable, replaced. 

Jason can see himself, actually see himself through another’s eyes, but it’s not as jarring as it was the first time. He can see the hard set of his jaw, feel a thrill of tampered-down hope, and then he’s stepping towards himself on the mats. The memory blurs - concussions smear recollections like bugs on a windscreen - but Jason still feels the crack of a staff against his ribs, feels his own reverberate in his hands as he hooks his other's ankle and drives him into the mat. Feels the curl of surprise and something deeper, something embedded in him flex, before those lips part in a vicious grin, those hands suring against him, and his world’s wrenched sideways and down, and then darkness. 

The burst of colour that follows is as nauseating as it is disorienting. Alarms are shrill in his ears, spitting danger, and the tendons up his arms are screaming with how tightly his fist is clenched around nothing. On the visor screen in front of him, he can see his sword embedded in the chest of a what is easily a category four Kaiju. Its hands, four in all, are wrapped around Jason’s shoulders, squeezing hard enough that he thinks something might fracture, even though he’s safe in the confines of the helm, held together by a damaged suit. He grunts, hears the groan of metal around him and the electronic sizzle of fried interfaces, and then feels the wrench and pop of his shoulder dislocating under the force of those constricting fists. 

The pain is paramount, washing over him in waves that don’t dim or cease, filling his open maw with salt water and his lungs with deluge as he expunges as much of the agony as he can from his writing body. 

“Rupture in the drift,” a mechanic voice bleats into his ear, but Jason can barely focus past the pain. 

Through the blindness, he sures his grip on his weapon, angles and thrusts it deeper into the creature’s ribcage. Prays that it feels pain because it deserves to feel what he feels right now. The entire left side of Jason’s body is roiling in fire. His right side is numb, and Jason doesn’t want to look, doesn't want to look, doesn't want to- 

“Neural handshake weakening. Re-establishing connection.” 

When Jason looks to his right, to his partner, to his _ friend _\- Roy is gone. 

A hollowed husk of night sky remains, a piece of the helm ruptured and torn away as Jason stares at the peaceful spray of stars and seafoam, so distant, so far from this hellish chaos he’s been left in. He feels the cold bite into his flesh with a vengeance, feels the tears solidify immediately to ice on his lashes, and he blinks and Roy’s gone. 

Tim’s there, smaller, weaker - _ protect him _\- saying something loudly and evenly but Jason can’t hear him, can’t unjumble the words from the roar of the ocean in his ears and the feeling of his ribcage collapsing under those enormous fists. Tim’s expression pinches and hardens, and then he scowls like when Roy used to curse, and the melancholy of it splinters Jason’s chest. 

Tim’s hands come up, shucking the helmet and gloves with rigorous efficiency. Alarms blare, different sounds to the ones echoing back through the drift, and all Jason can think is _ that’s not protocol_. 

Like that matters. Like that fucking matters when Roy is dead, and Jason’s _ dying_, and even with all these giants in the world it still feels enormous without him. Empty without him. 

Someone reaches up behind him - Jason feels the slide of hot, trembling hands against his jaw and then the back of his neck - and yanks the cable from the back of his helmet. Jason bleats a protest, but his visor twitches and half the interface dies, and some of the overload in his skull fades out with it. 

Jason chokes and _ inhales, _and there are hands jerking the cables off him, shucking his armour where he stands, motionless. He scrambles together enough of his awareness to bark a protest, bring his hands up, and shove the creature ripping him apart off him. 

Tim staggers back and hits the catwalk with a grunt of pain, blinks up at Jason as his shaking hands lift to throw his helmet off, free himself from the confines of a suit that feels ruptured, a body that feels broken and punctured and twisted, even when his isn’t. 

Jason wonders how much of that broken feeling is the neural load from the long-retired Jaeger’s punctured exoskeleton. Jason wonders how much of that broken feeling was Roy’s last moments in the drift. 

Jason pitches forward onto his knees and vomits onto the floor between Tim’s standard issue boots. 

* * *

They’re hauled in front of the Marshal. Allowed the brief respite to strip and redress into their tank tops and coveralls before being dumped in Bruce Wayne’s office, side by side. Same order as they had been in the helm, with Tim on Jason’s right. 

Only Jason stays seated. When Marshal Wayne verbally expresses his disappointment at their results, Tim’s on his feet and yelling. It’s not until Jason zones back in enough to make out the words that he realises Tim isn’t angry at _ him_. 

“He’s been here less than a week,” Tim screeches, face flushing red with his cold ire. “It’s his first time in a drift in nearly six years and you’re angry that it was unstable? What did you _ think _ was going to happen? The last time he stepped out of a Jaeger, he was alone.” 

Tim jolts then, shudders sharply, a wash of unease flitting over his features, and Jason knows that feeling. That’s the feeling of a foreign memory nestled so tight against your hippocampus that it feels like yours, when you know it’s not. 

“He wasn’t ready, I understand that,” Marshal Wayne is saying calmly, his tone masked in that way Jason hates. His palms are spread on the desk, his shoulders set in that eternal surety. “He’ll be reassigned. We’ll open call for a new copilot for you, and he-” 

The words spit from Tim’s lips, ripping up through his throat in a way that Jason can feel bruising his own trachea. “Reassigned?! He’s not being reassigned! I don’t have time to find a new partner. I can’t sit on my thumbs waiting for a copilot while the Breach is still active. I can’t pilot a Jaeger by myself; I _ need _ him. His drift signature the closest neural match to my signature that we’ve seen since I started at the academy! I’m not finding another partner because you don’t think-” 

“He’s not stable,” Wayne barks, and Tim lapses into immediate silence under that bellow. “He doesn’t know how to bury his dead.” 

Both of them flinch, Tim’s shoulders sagging in the aftermath. 

Wayne schools his tone, returning to that even gravel he usually employs when dealing with cadets, and says slowly, measured, “He’s bringing too much into the drift. It’s not stable. It’s not _ healthy, _ for either of you.” 

“I don’t want a new copilot,” Tim snaps, but it’s level, stringed with platitude. He glances down at Jason, and his jaw tightens. “I want him. It was his first time back in a Jaeger. It was a fluke. He can do better, I know him. I _ studied _ him. Get him stable, and we’ll try again. We’ll make it work. It has to work.” 

Wayne’s jaw tightens in response, a bitterness crossing his expression like he’s just been forced to swallow a sour pill. “You’re committed to seeing this through.” 

It’s not a question. Tim answers anyway, his tone firm. “It has to work. We don’t have any other options.” 

The Marshall doesn’t move for a long minute. Then he sighs and unfurls from his stiff posture, hooking his hands into the small of his back. “You’re both dismissed. Report back to your supervisors. I want you to log one hundred hours in a simulator before you get back in that Jaeger. I expect your next neural handshake to be clean, am I understood?” 

“Yes, sir,” Tim says with a practiced reverence. 

Wayne’s expression shifts to fall on Jason, still sitting in his chair. And it doesn’t soften, but there’s an empathy in his eyes that’s rawer than Jason can bear to feel right now. “Mister Todd?” 

“Yes, sir,” Jason replies sombrely, and means it. 

* * *

They’re in the hallway outside Marshall Wayne’s office when Tim finally breaks the silence lingering between them. 

“I didn’t ask what you wanted in there,” he says, and there’s a hint of remorse to it. Not enough, though, to suggest regret. “I mean, I’ve been inside your head now, so I know- I’d like to think that I know what your response would be.” He glances up, fixing Jason with a look that cuts down to the marrow, and says, “If you don’t want to be my copilot, say so.” 

“I do,” Jason replies, and there’s a touch of surprise in Tim’s reaction. 

He’s silent for a minute before he replies. “I don’t know if you got as strong a reading off me. But I need you to know that I don’t have any alternatives here. I have to be in that Jaeger the next time the Breach spits out another Kaiju. I need us to be ready to face it, and walk away in-tact enough to meet the next one. Do you think you can do that with me?” 

A thin flicker of irritation lights in Jason at his tone. At the casual way he talks about Jaeger missions - not like they’re notches on a belt, but like they’re a rolling count of success, like he can pick himself up and step right back into one like it’s not the most traumatic experience of his life, every time. Jason’s not sure if it’s rage or envy that makes his stomach clench in faint hatred, but he knows his answer regardless. “I can. I defended the East Coast for four years before-” 

He swallows, and hates himself. He knows he should be past this, should be over it, but the ghost is as potent here as it was in the drift. Jason’s right limbs tingle with a faded numbness. 

“Before my partner,” Jason tries again, the words thick and stilted in his tight throat. He knows what he wants to say, but they’re too heavy, too leaden on his tongue. 

“I know,” Tim cuts in with that absent dismissiveness. The kind he used to skip the introduction and get right to the meat of the problem in their briefing. It makes Jason’s temper flare like a blowtorch in an arsonist’s grip. “I read the file. You-” 

He doesn’t get any more words out, because Jason wraps a firm hand in the front of Tim’s coveralls and _ slams _ him against the wall hard enough to knock whatever air was left in him clear out. His eyes bulge, and Jason gives him enough leeway to suck in a sharp consolatory breath before he layers himself down and focuses on _ squeezing _ the air back out of him. 

He’s vaguely aware of Tim’s nails biting into his bicep, at the flex of his hips as he tries to dislodge himself from beneath Jason’s bulk. The rest of his consciousness is wrapped up in the way that arm aches like it’s being torn from its socket. 

“Don’t,” Jason spits, and sees Tim’s eyes dart up to fix on his expression. He must look murderous, because Tim _ visibly _ pales, “pretend you know a damned thing about Roy. You don’t get to walk around in my head and then act like you can reduce him down to a fucking data packet.” 

“Sorry,” Tim wheezes, the words a whisper between them. Jason’s lip curls, that rage flaring hot and painful through his chest, and he leans deeper into the pin, smothering the yelp of pain before it can breach Tim’s lips. 

“Don’t apologise to me,” he snarls. “You can’t apologise for that. I don’t want your _ pity_.” 

Tim shakes his head, tries to articulate something. But he’s too red in the face now, his breath curtailing in sharp, frantic gasps, so Jason takes a full stride back and lets him sag almost the whole way down to the ground. The sound he makes when he draws in his first full breath makes Jason’s gut twinge with guilt. When he looks down, his hands are shaking. 

Tim glances at them too, massaging the crease in his collarbone where Jason’s fist had been resting. He straightens gradually, the motion appeasing and wary. His expression reflects the contriteness in his tone when he says, “Not apologising for that, no, of course not.” He swallows stiffly, wincing slightly at the pain that washes through his draining face, and continues, “Sorry for dismissing it- _ him, _ like that. That was… I’m sorry.” 

Jason focuses on his exhale, reaching up stiffly to massage his shoulder as the breath hitches on its way through his lungs. “S’not your fault,” he mutters, swallowing down the latent fissions of rage. “I shouldn’t have- Sorry. Tim, I’m sorry.” 

“I get it.” 

Jason glances up, catches on the blue gaze that Tim has levelled on him, burning. There’s a crease in his brow that speaks of a maturity that Tim doesn’t carry in his youthful features. They all look like that. Jason’s seen it his own face more than once, staring back out from a mirror. 

Tim’s hands clench into fists at his sides, but his tone is firm when he says, “I’ve lost people. Other pilots. Partners, friends. All the ways you can imagine.” 

Jason does. Remembers the blank stares on other cadets’ faces, pulling bodies out from under a shattered seawall when his contingent had been called in to assist in the wake of a Kaiju attack. Remembers the tainted blood that stripped away his mother’s life every day until she ended it with a handful of too many pills and a soft, relieved grimace on her lips. Remembers the radiation sickness in Grayson’s bones from insufficient shielding in the first gen Jaegers, before they’d thought they’d last longer than the first few years of the Breach opening. Remembers the vegetative stares of the early pilots who had lost their minds to a neural overload, buried under the cacophony of a technology that hadn’t been perfected yet. Remembers the mangled limbs and stained bruises on the flesh of pilots who had returned after their successful missions, remembers the hollow beds of the pilots who hadn’t, buried with their Jaegers at sea. Remembers the sensation of Roy being ripped out of him, out of the core of him, out of Jason’s essence, and flung somewhere into the depths of the Gulf of Maine. Buried without his Jaeger. Buried without Jason there with him. 

Jason swallows and nods, and Tim’s expression softens in fatigue. 

“I don’t want to lose anyone else,” he says quietly, but it rings through Jason like the loudest thing he’s ever heard. “Not another pilot, not another civilian. Not one more damn person. Not while we’re alive. Not while we’re standing. Not while we’re able to do something about it.” 

“That attitude is going to get you killed, Drake,” Jason mutters, because it had gotten Roy killed, and Roy hadn’t been half as righteous or noble as Tim is. Roy had just been Roy, and Jason had lost him anyway. 

“Maybe,” Tim answers with a raw solemnity. His eyes flicker up, the ghost of a smile on his lips when he says, “But would you rather die here, or in a Jaeger?” 

For the first time in what feels like years, Jason smiles. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Atlantic Rim! Because Gotham borders the Atlantic Ocean, geddit? 
> 
> Drift Compatibility counts as Soulmates, right? And I know there's a whole heaping of (arguable) Jay/Roy in here, but losing a copilot is a pretty traumatic experience, my dudes. And we're only seeing Jason and Tim at the very start of their relationship, so it's not going to compare yet. Give it time to blossom. 
> 
> The fact that this is my longest short story for this challenge should tell you how much I adore the Pacific Rim film. And if you haven't seen it, please go watch it. Because it's awesome and I'm half-considering writing a full parallel Batfam Pacific Rim at this point. 
> 
> Also, I listened to "Dream" by Imagine Dragons (and the whole Smoke + Mirrors album) while writing this, and oof the resonance hurts. 
> 
> **Edit 08/30/19: I did [some art](https://meaninglessblah-writes.tumblr.com/post/187371630109/tim-jason-for-my-pacific-rim-au-fic-part-of) for this!**


End file.
